[In the following essay, Dyer examines Forman's emphasis on celebrating the emotions of his characters in Peter and Pavla and A Blonde in Love.]

Directors cannot be relied upon to look and sound like the films which they make. Milos Forman, who with two Czech films has made much the same quiet impact as Olmi did a few years ago, can. There's no good reason why one should expect him to live up to the image which his films create. It is simply interesting that—having lunch with him, hearing him introduce his latest film at the London Film Festival—his...

Milos Forman's A Blonde in Love is a wonderful film concerning, among other things, young love, sexual and social timidity, parental incomprehension, and the problems of a Czech community where the ratio of women to men is 16 to one. It's so much of a piece in fact, so funny and painful and precise in its observation of a sector of the human condition, that it presents a very real problem: how to describe it...

Philip T. Hartung (review date 11 November 1966)

[In the following excerpt, Hartung offers a positive assessment of Forman's casting choices in Loves of a Blonde.]

Now in general release is Loves of a Blonde, the Czech movie that opened the New York Film Festival in September and won huzzas from most of the reviewers. Perhaps the critics, impressed with the glamor of this opening night, let some of their enthusiasm spill over into their reviews of this heart-warming and unpretentious little picture about romance-hungry adolescents. In any case, audiences can now judge for themselves—and they will find Loves...

[In the following review, Kauffmann commends Forman's artistic vision in Taking Off, but argues that the film lacks consistency and direction.]

Milos Forman had an interesting idea in Taking Off. He wanted to do a film about the generation gap that made its point primarily through pictures. The content of most films, particularly the ones with social themes, is usually conveyed in words and story. Taking Off has words and a story, of course, but they are only the scaffolding for the purely cinematic elements, which really state the theme....

[In the following excerpt, Westerbeck offers a negative assessment of Taking Off, noting that the film's ending is “completely arbitrary.”]

Like most films about the youth culture, Taking Off should be called Ripping Off. Director Milos Forman doesn't seem to have been satisfied with the usual cynicism of exploiting teenagers merely as paid admissions to his film: he's also exploited them as extras in the film. Taking Off begins in a rehearsal hall where some impresarios of rock are auditioning hundreds of spaced-out,...

‘I think I speak English well enough to understand the “first row.” But what's behind that, the double meanings, and all the nuances, which are very beautiful, always this is difficult for me.’ Milos Forman needn't have worried about those nuances. Taking Off, which he made in America last summer, is replete with them.

We say we'd like to see ourselves as others see us, but we don't always like what we see. The...

Michael Wood (review date 5 February 1976)

SOURCE: Wood, Michael, “No, But I Read the Book.” New York Review of Books 23, no. 1 (5 February 1976): 3-4.

[In the following excerpt, Wood compliments Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, noting that Forman's quieter, more realistic approach to the material adds sensitivity to the story.]

Kubrick is attracted by apparent impossibilities. Lolita,A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon are all, in their different ways, highly literary texts, works that seem to defy translation into film. (“How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” the advertising asked when the movie was first...

John Coleman (review date 27 February 1976)

[In the following excerpt, Coleman explores the themes of sanity versus insanity and love versus hate in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.]

Ken Kesey's novel [One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest] caused quite a stir when it first appeared in 1962, and rightly. I had heard vaguely of Kesey as a major prophet of the youth revolution, read some disjointed scraps of his somewhere or other, and knew that his book about life in a mental institution was supposed to have been written under the influence of LSD: the auguries were unpromising. But the other day I laid bold hands...

[In the following review, Champlin assesses the strengths of Hair, calling the film a “poignant reminder” of America during the Vietnam War era.]

Fresh off the bus, duffel bag in hand, the boy from Oklahoma stares in wonderment. A happening is happening in Central Park, Manhattan Island, U.S.A., vintage '60s. Crazy kids with long hair and costume clothes are sporting on the greensward. Then, like a foreboding shadow, two mounted policemen invade the scene, towering over it and monstrously silhouetted, keep the sunshine out.

Richard A. Blake (review date 7 April 1979)

[In the following excerpt, Blake commends Hair's atmosphere of “great good fun,” but cautions against the film's tendency to sanitize historical events.]

Sanitizing the past is easier than living with ugly memories. Self-exoneration is, of course, a key motive for reshaping the past. Today, for example, people who admit they once admired Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against Communists (and, incidentally, the Constitution) are as rare as those who can recall their enthusiasm for stopping the Red menace in Vietnam. Everybody, it seems, was on the right side...

[In the following excerpt, Kauffmann examines the change of public perceptions and attitudes between the original theatrical production of Hair and the release of Forman's film adaptation.]

Hair (United Artists) is chockablock with imaginative lift and pyrotechnical dazzle, all of it apparently intended to forestall question. That question, of course, is: Is Hair dated? Well, most of the songs (most of which have been retained from the original score) are still engaging, and much of the filming is fine. But Hair, even...

Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr. (review date 25 May 1979)

[In the following review, Westerbeck offers a negative assessment of Hair, criticizing Forman's understanding of American culture and the editing of the film's dance sequences.]

No one lives in the Age of Aquarius today. Its “dawning,” celebrated ten years ago in the musical Hair, turned out to be its twilight as well. Still, Hair remains pertinent. It continues to tell us something about our collective life as Americans. Popular shows usually do this. They are a revelation to us of ourselves, especially shows that are surprisingly popular...

[In the following review, Benson asserts that much of the depth of E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is lost in its film adaptation.]

E. L. Doctorow's bold exhilarating novel Ragtime, his “real-world act,” was a newsreel of America at a critical period, from 1902 until just the end of World War I when “the era of Ragtime had run out.” America at that time combined innocence, optimism, energy and personal and social ambition at levels it would never reach again.

When E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime was published a few years ago, there was much heavy-handed discussion of its fanciful mixture of fact and fiction. In retrospect, the controversy seems to have grossly exaggerated the seriousness of what actually is little more than an entertaining commercial novel with a distinctly cartoonish quality. The film adaptation, [Ragtime,] on the other hand, directed by Milos Foreman from a script by Michael Weller, exhibits precisely the...

David Thomson (review date January-February 1982)

[In the following excerpt, Thomson argues against Ragtime's negative critical reception, asserting that the film is well adapted and masterfully directed.]

Milos Forman's film of Ragtime omits many delightful views and moments from the book. Why not? It is a film, and it has assets denied to the novel. It does not go to the North Pole with Peary and Father, or to the pyramids with J. P. Morgan. J. P.'s strawberry nose and his stomach rumblings about reincarnation are both dropped: apart from a “newsreel” flash, the film's Morgan is only the absent...

John Simon (review date 5 February 1982)

[In the following excerpt, Simon asserts that Ragtime's unsuccessful transition from page to screen is due to the novel's diffuse storyline structure.]

For once I am in complete agreement with the majority of my colleagues: Ragtime, the movie, does not work, largely because one misses the kaleidoscopic construction of the Doctorow novel. Milos Forman, the director, and Michael Weller, the scenarist, chose what they felt to be the principal strands of this multifarious web: Evelyn Nesbit and the celebrated murder case; Coalhouse Walker Jr., the black musician...

[In the following essay, Jacobson explores the working relationship between Forman and Saul Zaentz, the producer of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.]

So long and so used to measuring the achievements of individual genius, we have built a culture devoted to it. Time tells us that we have begun trying to teach the fetus in the womb. In the most wanton and random of our acts, war, we single out a man here or there for a medal. And in between, we have this problem of the artist: is he an artist if he doesn't sell? When does the man...

[In the following essay, Shaffer—the author of the play that Amadeus was based on—discusses his working relationship with Forman, describing the process of how they adapted the play into film.]

The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to work in. Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone living largely by the spoken word. Increasingly, as American films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent that the most successful are being spoken in Screenspeak, a kind of cinematic esperanto equally comprehensible in...

[In the following review, Kauffmann argues that although Amadeus is an improvement over the original play, the film is still implausible and poorly acted.]

Lucky are those who see the film of Amadeus without having seen the play. Peter Shaffer's original was markedly different in the London and New York productions that I saw, but both of them used theatrical conceits as if they were virtuosity, when in fact they were padding for a thin body—tricks like an address to the audience and a stylized chorus. Shorn of this spurious...

Gilbert Adair (review date spring 1985)

[In the following review, Adair examines the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus.]

In the beginning, probably, was the word; or name: Amadeus. Futile as it surely must be to speculate on the various mazy processes of free association rippling through an artist's consciousness when a project enters its formative stage, it might just be worth playing the game with Milos Forman's Amadeus—not only was creativity the subject of Peter Shaffer's play, it was a shortfall of creativity that constituted its own tragic flaw. Why, then, did Shaffer call it...

[In the following excerpt, O'Brien argues that Valmont is more sensitive to the underlying humanity of its characters than Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons.]

First things first: Valmont is not a remake of Dangerous Liaisons. Generally, it tells the same story; tonally, it is a completely different, sometimes better, sometimes weaker film. Its source is not the Broadway play, but the original novel; on the other hand, the film's credits declare it is “loosely based” on Laclos's text. Its new flavor reflects the humanistic vision of the...

[In the following excerpt, Kauffmann compares Valmont to Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons, arguing that Valmont is the weaker of the two films.]

In less than a year since Dangerous Liaisons comes another film made from the Laclos novel. This one is called Valmont (Orion), after the leading male character; was directed by Milos Forman, whose last work was Amadeus; and was adapted from Laclos by Jean-Claude Carrière (with, uncredited, Forman). Carrière has had one of the most active of screenwriting careers since he began in...

[In the following review, Billson compliments Forman's casting choices in Valmont, describing the film as more plausible and enjoyable than Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons.]

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos is my own personal Bonfire of the Vanities. Given it to read at an impressionable age, I promptly concluded that “la Marquise de Merteuil, c'est moi,” and went on to develop that obsessive possessiveness reserved for one's favourite works of fiction. None shall touch! And if they must touch, they'd...

[In the following review, Bowie asserts that although Valmont is visually stunning, the film is ultimately a sterile adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses.]

What will Milos Forman do next?, cinema-goers were entitled to ask themselves during the long years of silence that followed Amadeus. Forman's career had been Protean, after all, and the gulf between, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Shaffer adaptation was perhaps even more remarkable than the caesura that the Soviet tanks had inserted between his early Czech-language...

George B. MacDonald (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: MacDonald, George B. “Control by Camera: Milos Forman as Subjective Narrator.” In A Casebook on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, edited by George J. Searles, pp. 163-72. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, MacDonald analyzes the intent and effect of the subjective camera technique that Forman employs in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, highlighting Forman's use of color and point-of-view.]

The film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that rare adaptation which balances a respect for its literary source with a rich contribution of cinematic meanings. [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's...

[In the following review of Turnaround, Hislop underscores the recurring theme of betrayal in Forman's life and body of work.]

Off-screen at least, betrayal in Hollywood has all the sinfulness of a quick costume change—it's just business. “Turnaround” is a Hollywood term for a shift in loyalty, when a project is transferred from one studio to another, but, for Milos Forman, betrayal is no casual business. Its moral consequences and historical nuances permeate this subtle, witty autobiography, written with the Czech novelist Jan Novak, as it does his...

[In the following interview, Forman discusses his views on censorship and his film The People vs. Larry Flynt.]

The controversy inspired by Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt has focused attention on America's most notorious pornographer and Hustler magazine's virulent misogyny. Unfortunately, this ongoing debate has yielded considerably more heat than political or moral illumination. Distinctions between Hustler's frequently vile brand of porn, First-Amendment issues, and Flynt's personal life have become...

[In the following essay, Freund examines the issues of capitalism and left-wing vs. right-wing politics in response to The People vs. Larry Flynt.]

Quick: Name an icon of “capitalism at its most unabashed.” Who'd you come up with? Somebody like Bill Gates from the exploding information economy? A Daddy Warbucks from Wall Street? Some old-time, public-be-damned robber baron?

The correct answer—at least the one given by The New York Times—is pornographer Larry Flynt. [He is] portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Milos Forman's movie,...

[In the following essay, Holmstrom discusses Forman's response to the negative critical reaction to The People vs. Larry Flynt.]

Milos Forman already won the Golden Globe Award as best director for his controversial new movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt. And just yesterday, he also earned an Oscar nomination for the same film. Entertainment Weekly magazine predicts Mr. Forman is a “shoo-in” for the Academy Award.

But Forman, honored twice before with Oscars (best director for One Flew Over the...

[In the following review, Bruzzi argues that Forman glosses over the darker side of Larry Flynt's persona in The People vs. Larry Flynt, therefore lessening the importance of Flynt's First Amendment battles with the U.S. Supreme Court.]

Kentucky, 1952. Two boys, one of them Larry Flynt, manufacture and sell moonshine liquor. Twenty years later, Larry is running the Hustler go-go club, where he meets Althea Leasure, a dancer he later marries, after the Hustler ‘newsletter’ has become a commercial porn magazine and made him...

[In the following review, Newey questions the reality behind Forman's “softening” of Larry Flynt's character in The People vs. Larry Flynt.]

From the opening credits of The People vs Larry Flynt, it is clear that the real hero of this film is the American flag. The stars and stripes form a near-constant backdrop to Milos Forman's biopic of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, the king of blue-collar porn; the New York Times has even described the film as “the most patriotic movie of the year.”

[In the following review, Fuller analyzes the public reaction to The People vs. Larry Flynt and expresses surprise that the majority of debate came from liberal and feminist groups.]

The People vs. Larry Flynt is a recent addition to the surprisingly small store of Hollywood films dealing with censorship, freedom of speech, and First Amendment controversies. Previous films featured likable, unassuming, Everyman protagonists such as Edward G. Robinson's journalist in Dispatch from Reuter's (1940),...

[In the following essay, Rapf explores the dynamics of the novel Ragtime and examines the elements that were lost and retained in its film adaptation.]

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

[In the following review, Sterritt dismisses the negative critical response to Man on the Moon, arguing that the film is both thought-provoking and mischievous.]

Man on the Moon joined the list of 1999's most misunderstood movies within hours of its first press screenings, as assorted critics started complaining they'd been cheated of the Andy Kaufman biopic they'd apparently come to see. The film's lukewarm box-office reception probably had a similar cause, abetted by lingering memories of Kaufman's actual career, which still conjures up...

[In the following excerpt, Felperin asserts that Man on the Moon neither explains nor justifies Andy Kaufman's life and career.]

Clearly, if you're going to spend ＄52 million making a movie about a now-obscure comedian from the 70s, you have to believe his life is extraordinary in some way. (It's probably rule number one in the textbook for film-school courses called Advanced Screenwriting: Biopics.) Indeed on paper, Andy Kaufman's life story sounds thrillingly unlikely. Here's an introverted situationist manqué who rose to...

Jonathan Romney (review date 8 May 2000)

[In the following review, Romney applauds Forman's casting choices in Man on the Moon, but finds that the film offers no further insight into Andy Kaufman's life.]

To American audiences in the 1970s and 1980s, the comedian Andy Kaufman was a legendary figure whose confrontational routines turned show-business conventions upside down. In Britain, where he was known mainly as the ingratiatingly kooky Latka in the TV sitcom Taxi, Milos Forman's biopic Man on the Moon won't mean quite so much. There's an uncomfortable sense of “you had to be there”:...